The present invention generally relates to digital processing systems and more specifically relates to digital processing system architectures employing both general purpose and special purpose processing elements used to efficiently operate on variable size data bases.
Performing complex searches using general purpose processors can prove quite inefficient if multiple instructions are required to operate upon each field of each record. Yet the search tasks may be quite simple in nature and very repetitive in relation to the normal tasks accomplished by general purpose processors. A special purpose processor can be designed which will efficiently search a given data base. Such special purpose processors are common in the communication industry, for example. Most such processors, however, are not sufficiently flexible to be applied to a wide range of data base search problems.